Byte-Sized Middle Ages: Tolkien, Film, and the Digital Imagination

BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES: TOLKIEN, FILM, AND THE DIGITAL IMAGINATION by Courtney M. Booker A note on the wall says, Magic word XYZZY. Will Crowther, programmer of Adventure In a letter to the New York Times, Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauz Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the foun-der (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, observed that the mass appeal of Peter Jacksons film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings owes much to the computer culture that made J. R. R. Tolkiens fantasy world its own.1 There is an entire book packed within this statement. Certainly many peopleespecially those born since the early 1960snow understand that there is some kind of connection among Tolkiens fiction, the game of Dungeons and Drag-ons, and computer programming. Yet this connection is usually trivi-alized or ridiculed as nothing but a clear sign of the eccentric, tedious interests that define (male) misanthropes, freaks, and geeks.2 Thus what Turkles remark suggests is that to understand the success of the films of Tolkiens novel is to understand a revenge of the nerds, so to speak. Put another way, part of the reason many enjoy the Lord of the Rings films is because they seem to make sense visuallybut this visual sen-sibility is one that was learned, and learned only relatively recently. Who were the teachers? In the early 1960s many readers of Tolkiens An earlier version of this paper was delivered on 6 June 2002 as part of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies film lecture series, Los Angeles, California. I wish to thank Blair Sullivan, Kevin Attell, Scott McDonough, Clementine Oliver, John Eldevik, Paul Dutton, Paul Sinfield, Susan Cho, and Leslie Paris. 1S. Turkle, Lord of the Hackers, New York Times, 7 March 2002, sec. A, p. 31. 2See B. King and J. Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture, from Geek to Chic (Emeryville, CA 2003); and A. Leonard, Lord of the Geeks, Salon.com Technology, 30 December 2002 . For the two most accurate dramatic portrayals of the kids who played Dungeons and Dragons ca. 1980, see the television series Freaks and Geeks, episode 18, Discos and Dragons, written and directed by Paul Feig (2000); and the film SLC Punk!, written and directed by James Merendino (1999). As I shall describe in more detail below, these same interests were for a time regarded with deep suspicion, and believed by some to lead frequently to unhealthy, dangerous, and even criminal behavior. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 146novel imagined its medieval fantasy world as a boundless place, filled with mystery, grandeur, and historical depth. Four decades later, the same book has been interpreted for screen audiences largely in terms of frenetic actionschases, skirmishes, and battles reflective of a modular sensibility of episodic encounter and engagement wrought by the virtual reality of computer games. In the pages that follow, I wish to offer something of a prolegomenon to that book packed within Turkles statement noted above and examine in historical perspective how and why this modern visual/cinematic understanding of Tolkiens Middle-earth in particular, and consequently of the Middle Ages in general, has come to rely upon and be shaped by a shared stock of stylized referents related to the virtual reality of computers. *** When I was a teaching assistant at UCLA, my colleagues and I were taught to be sensitive to the diverse cultural backgrounds of students in our courses, for these differences could subtly affect the dynamics of classroom discussion. Yet never was an equivalent recommendation offered about how to deal with the diversity of preconceptions held by students regarding the topic of the course itself. Rather, we were simply advised to deduce these preconceptions by asking students why they enrolled in the classa question that typically elicited any combination of three unhelpful answers: it suits my schedule, it fulfills a univer-sity requirement, and/or it seems like an interesting period and cul-ture. In short, the basic pedagogical presumption was that students are a blank slate for the teacher to inscribe, or they are already inscribed with misconceptions that must be corrected. As Sharan Newman insists in an essay published in the Medieval Academy of Americas Septem-ber 2000 newsletter, it is incumbent upon medievalists to un-teach the popular mythology that people learn outside the classroom.3 Now certainly there are cases where this is necessarytake, for example, a sardonic letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times shortly after the events of September 11, which claimed that Jerry Falwells inflamma-tory remarks linking the attacks to homosexuals and abortionists were not just ill-timed, as Falwell himself grudgingly conceded, but belied a mentality straight out of the Middle Ages.4 Nevertheless, what Newman and others fail to realize in their hubris about un- 3S. E. Newman, Reaching Way Out: Presenting the Middle Ages to Modern Amer-ica, Medieval Academy News 137 (September 2000) 3. 4Letter from William Lorton, Los Angeles Times, 20 September 2001, sec. B, p. 14. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 147teaching such views is that students often largely retain their prior understanding of the Middle Ages (as irrational, intolerant, prone to violence, etc.) and merely adjust this resilient image by replacing cer-tain parts here and filling in gaps there with the philologi-cally/archaeologically derived information they learn in the classroom.5 If this notion of a hybridor, as some might say, bastardizedview of the Middle Ages is correct, then it is justifiable to examine the popular view of the Middle Ages in historical perspective in order to understand, rather than condemn or trivialize, our students preconcep-tions about the Middle Ages, as well as our own.6 What is this popular view and how did it come about? There is, of course, no single popular view, but rather, as one might imagine, a multitude of ideas about what life was like during the Middle Ages. Umberto Ecos famous 1975 es-say entitled Dreaming of the Middle Ages, and Carlo Ginzburgs lesser-known article on the medias use of medieval analogies to char-acterize the electrical blackout that enveloped New York City in 1965 clearly reveal this rich variety of modern ideas about medieval times.7 Yet despite these taxonomies the predominant view in this variety is now unequivocally Tolkienesque. 5Morton Bloomfield was more optimistic (and self-congratulatory) about this process due to his narrow focus upon the adjustments made as a result of their classroom ex-perience by those few students who would later go on to become professional medieval-ists themselves: Many of our excellent scholars were, when young, driven to explore their delight in Arthur, knights, ladies in distress, lovely women, honest laborers, beauti-ful castles and paintings in greater detail by taking our courses. M. W. Bloomfield, Reflections of a Medievalist: America, Medievalism, and the Middle Ages, in B. Rosenthal and P. E. Szarmach, eds., Medievalism in American Culture (Binghamton 1989) 26. 6See S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Fu-ture of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia 2001); idem, Making Historical Sense in P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, and S. Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York 2000) 306325; together with O. G. Oexle, The Middle Ages through Modern Eyes: A Historical Problem, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society series 6, vol. 9 (1999) 121142. 7U. Eco, Dreaming of the Middle Ages, in idem, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego 1986) 6172; C. Ginzburg, Des tnbres mdivales au Black-Out de New York (aller-retour), Europe: Revue littraire mensuelle 61 (no. 654) (October 1983) 514. See also A. Lindley, The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film, Screening the Past 3 (1998) . As a follow-up to Ginzburgs essay, it would be inter-esting to study the representations used to characterize the massive blackout that hit the east coast of North America in August of 2003; see The Blackout of 2003, New York Times, 15 August 2003, sec. A, p. 1. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 148Translated into more than forty languages (including Esperanto), re-cently voted the greatest book of the twentieth century in a number of polls, and now a film having grossed nearly three billion dollars at the box office worldwide, J. R. R. Tolkiens pseudo-medieval, philologi-cally constructed fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings has broadly be-come the standard referent in peoples minds of medieval cultureof what those people who once inhabited the castles, churches, and walled towns that ornament much of England and the Continent were perhaps vaguely like. One important effect of this Tolkienesque Middle Ages to which I can attest both from personal experience and from my work in the classroom is the absence of religion from popular notions of medie-val culture. Typically, American students understand the Middle Ages as a period that valued individual honor, nobility, heroism, and vio-lencethat is, chivalric culturebut they have difficulty integrating the deep corporate religiosity of the era into this same understanding. Of course Tolkien was not the first to eschew religion in a tale of me-dieval fantasyWalter Scott, Mark Twain, and Robert E. Howard are but a few of his many notable forerunners in this regard. But Tolkiens increasing influence over the last forty years in a variety of media has done much to secure this popular idea of a chivalric, impassioned, but essentially secular Middle Ages. One thing that is certain is that Tolkiens influence has increased. First published in 19541955, ostensibly as a three-volume sequel to his popular childrens book The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings is an epic tale of good against evil, set in a world populated with elves, dwarves, hobbits, men, orcs, goblins, and much, much more. By now widely familiar, the basic plot of the novel is the destruction by the forces of good of the master ring wrought by The Enemy, Sauron, before he can recover this One Ring and with its great power (a tiny fraction of which is its bestowal of invisibility) enslave the world.8 Al- 8Perhaps what is less familiar is the similarity Tolkiens story bears to the anecdote told by Plato about the legendary ring of Gyges (The Republic 359360). One day, after a period of heavy rain, the Lydian shepherd Gyges was out with his flock when he came upon a great chasm in the earth that the severe weather had washed open. Descending into the depths, Gyges encountered a large bronze horse with numerous doors in its sides. Opening the hatches, the shepherd discovered to his amazement that within the statue lay a giant corpse with a gold ring on one of its fingers. Gyges took the ring and returned to the surface. Sometime later, during a meeting with his fellow shepherds, Gyges began to fidget with the strange ring he was now wearing, and by chance turned it so that its bezel faced inwards, toward the palm of his hand. To his great surprise, the shepherd learned that he had become invisible; what was more, by returning the ring to its original posi-BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 149though published in the mid-1950s, Tolkiens novel did not catch on in the United States and England until the late 1960s. At that time, the counterculture in the U.S. swiftly embraced Tolkiens epic of Middle-earth and the meek hobbits victorious struggle against the seemingly insurmountable forces of darkness. A pirated paperback edition by Ace Books in 1965 made the book cheap and readily available; to counter this unauthorized edition and recover some of its losses, Houghton Mif-flin, in conjunction with Ballantine Books, flooded the market with their own American paperback edition, this one bearing Tolkiens offi-cial authorization.9 Due to the legal dispute with Ace Books that soon followed, a good deal of publicity was generated, which had the unin-tended effect of helping to put Tolkiens book at the top of the best-seller list.10 But it wasnt hype that caused the Tolkien phenomenonand a phe-nomenon it certainly was. According to Tolkiens official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, in the mid- to late 1960s badges began to appear tion, he found that he could once again be seen. Recognizing the rings great power and its even greater potential, Gyges immediately made off to the royal palace and, by means of the ring, committed adultery with the queen, slew the king, and took possession of the kingdom after killing all those who might pose a threat to his rule. According to Plato, the Gyges anecdote was used by an interlocutor of Socrates to challenge the old philosopher on his concepts of justice and human nature. To the interlocutor, the Gyges story sug-gested that even the purest, most virtuous person would not resist committing a wrong to fulfill his desires if he could do so with impunity. Thus, so-called just behavior is nothing more than a by-product of the fear of being caught and punished for wrongdoing. To prove that this view is incorrect, Socrates countered his opponents argument by demon-strating that a man can act justly of his own innate will, and indeed, that such right con-duct is preferable for its own sake; or, in other words, that it is possible for a just con-science to resist the temptation of Gygess ring. If one were able to locate Tolkiens personal copy of The Republic, it would certainly be interesting to see what, if any, marginalia exist near the Gyges passages. Unfortunately Tolkiens library has been for the most part dispersed. For Tolkiens own comments on his marginalia and his library, see H. Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Bos-ton 1981) 356358 [Letter to Zillah Sherring, 20 July 1965]; 397 [Letter to Christopher Tolkien, 2 January 1969]. To my knowledge, the earliest comparison of Tolkiens ring to that of Gyges was by R. Evans, J. R. R. Tolkien (New York 1972) 51. On the ring of Gyges, see K. F. Smith, The Tale of Gyges and the King of Lydia, American Journal of Philology 23 (1902) 261282, 361387; idem, The Literary Tradition of Gyges and Candaules, American Journal of Philology 41 (1920) 137; and C. M. Booker, Writing a Wrong: The Divestiture of Louis the Pious (833) and the Decline of the Carolingians (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles 2002) 527530. 9See H. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston 1977) 226229; and D. A. Anderson, A Note on the Text in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Collectors Edition (Boston 1987) vviii. 10For Tolkiens own comments on this, see Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 364 [Letter to Michael George Tolkien, 30 October 1965]. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 150on students lapels with slogans that read, Frodo Lives, Gandalf for President, and Come to Middle-earth. Tolkien fan clubs were form-ing in ever greater numberssome devoted to the serious, scholarly aspects of the authors work, while others held hobbit picnics to which members came dressed as their favorite characters from the sto-ries and dined on mushrooms, cakes, and cider. Numerous rock bands, such as Led Zeppelin and Rush, alluded to Tolkiens novel in their songs and concert films, while city streets were graffitied with catch-phrases like J. R. R. Tolkien is Hobbit-forming.11 Depending on ones tastes, everyone has a favorite or contemptible example of the massive appropriation of Tolkien over the last forty years. Some per-sonal favorites are the twenty student-residence halls at UC Irvine built in 1974 and named after characters and places in Tolkiens realm of Middle-earth; and the chimpanzee studied by Jane Goodall, whom she named Frodo; and the standard English text of Hegels Phenomenol-ogy of Spirit having been translated at Rivendell; and The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins sung by Leonard Nimoy; and the adoption of Saurons Lidless Eye as a battle emblem by South Vietnamese troops in 1967this apparently having been the strange result of an American officers botched attempt to improve his Vietnamese by translating Tolkiens book.12 In 1972 one could walk from UCLA down to West-wood Boulevard, turn onto Gayley Avenue, and find a bookstore called A Change of Hobbit, which was owned by a self-styled Hobbitch and was cooled not by air-conditioning but by Aries Conditioning.13 11Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (n. 9 above) 230. See now B. Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (New York 2003) 193220. On Tolkien and music, see W. Straw, Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal in S. Frith and A. Goodwin, eds., On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (New York 1990) 108; and M. Millar, Led Zeppelin and the Pixies in C. Roberts, ed., Idle Worship (Boston 1995) 3545. 12On the residence halls, see ; on the chimpanzee (b. 1976), see ; on the translation of Hegel, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford 1977) xxxi; on Nimoys ballad [for which a video exists (!) and can be viewed on the Internet], see Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, side 2, track 1 (Dot Records, 1968: DLP 25835); on the battle emblem, see D. J. Stewart, The Hobbit War, The Nation 205, no. 11 (9 October 1967) 333, quoting a report from Publishers Weekly, 4 September 1967, although cf. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (n. 9 above) 230, claiming that in Saigon a Vietnamese dancer was seen bearing the lidless eye of Sauron on his shield. 13See the advertisement in the program to the L. A. Con: The 30th World Science Fic-tion Convention, September 1st4th, 1972, p. 132. A branch of this store, called The Other Change of Hobbit, still exists at 2020 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 151While many theories have been offered to explain this outbreak of Tolkien fever, some consensus seems to have been reached on two ex-planations. First, many see the initial rage for Tolkien as the product of an early, pronounced desire for escapism by youth facing the rapidly escalating conflict in Vietnam, youth who, ironically, felt a vicarious sense of empowerment in their escape to Middle-earth, where even the most powerless, insignificant person can change the world.14 Second, many also argue that the growing ecological movement of the 1960s found fertile ground in Tolkiens strong preference for natural land-scapes and materials and his loathing for industrial society and its tech-niques of so-called development.15 It should be kept in mind that Tolkien, who died in 1973 at the age of 81, had witnessed much of this phenomenon himselfsomething he characterized as my deplorable cultus.16 The only explanation he could find for the giddy enthusiasm of the countless young Americans phoning his home in the middle of the night and writing him sackloads of fan mail was that Art moves them and they dont know what theyve been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that Im not.17 Certainly he rejected the criticism that his novel was escapist; indeed, he had anticipated such accusations years earlier when he wrote on the poetics of fairy-stories: 14See the strident criticism of such Tolkienesque escapism by D. J. Stewart, The Hobbit War, The Nation 205, no. 11 (9 October 1967) 332334. 15See Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (n. 11 above) 175178, 180; J. Bearman, Fantasylands: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Power of Myth, L.A. Weekly vol. 24, no. 5 (2127 December 2001) 36; and the all-vegetarian student cooperative house at UC Berkeley, Lothlorien . For Tolkiens own feelings about the natural world and modern development, see Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 420 [Letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, 30 June 1972], nothing ... compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private indi-viduals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing. See also his comments in the following note below. 16Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (n. 9 above) 231. See also Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 359 [Letter to W. H. Auden, 4 August 1965], such things fill me too with alarm and despondency; 412 [Letter to Carole Batten-Phelps, Autumn, 1971], The horrors of the American scene I will pass over, though they have given me great distress and labour. (They arise in an entirely different mental climate and soil, polluted and im-poverished to a degree only paralleled by the lunatic destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit.). 17Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (n. 9 above) 231235. Cf. the observation by Mark Twain (P. Fatout, ed., Mark Twain Speaking [Iowa City 1976] 158) that litera-ture might be treated with greater respect by the law if only a body could ... get drunk on it. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 152I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which Escape is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.... Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.18 Tolkiens good friend C. S. Lewis would only second this position, expressing his like feelings in the same terms: The only people who worry about escapism, he explained, are jailers.19 It is in the context of this hobbit mania of the early 1970s that we come upon the activities of two young men in the American Midwest. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were tabletop war-gamers, that is, they used lead miniatures to reconstruct historical battles and wage their own simulated little wars. Now, the hobby of war-gaming has its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, when a Prussian staff offi-cer, using topographical maps and metal miniatures, devised a game called Kriegspiel as a training aid for officers. The simulated tabletop conflicts were ideal for teaching cadets various elements of military tactics and strategy.20 More than a century and a half later, such war-gamingwith early encouragement, endorsement, and codification by H. G. Wellshad spread beyond the confines of military instruction to become a thriving underground hobby, with clubs in most major American cities recreating nearly every type of historical battle imagin-able.21 Thus, despite the fact that Gygax lived in Lake Geneva, Wiscon- 18J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, in idem, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London 1983) 148 [originally delivered as a lecture at St. Andrews Uni-versity in 1939, and subsequently published in 1945]. 19Quoted in A. C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London 1999) 81. On Lewiss friendship with Tolkien, see H. Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (London 1978). 20See G. A. Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago 1983) 89. 21See H. G. Wells, Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girls Who Like Boys Games and Books; with an Appendix on Kriegspiel (London 1913). For an overview of war-gaming history, see A. Wilson, The Bomb and the Computer: Wargaming from Ancient Chinese Mapboard to Atomic Computer (New York 1968); A. H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, Business, and Politics (New York 1971) with incredible photographs; BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 153sin, and Arneson was enrolled at the University of Minnesota, Min-neapolis-St. Paul, the two met at war-gaming tournaments attended by their respective clubs. As founding members of the Castle and Cru-sade Society, a war-gaming sub-group devoted to the Middle Ages, both men held a particular interest in recreating medieval battles. Yet they were also both becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the imper-sonal aspect of commanding entire armies. Something needed to change. In 1971, Gygax and Arneson, by then in their early thirties, collabo-rated to create a game and a set of rules that allowed players to enact the roles of single characters on heroic quests; no longer generic troops on the battlefield, players could now direct fictional heroesthose with their own histories and personalitiesthrough a variety of imaginary scenarios and environments.22 Modifying the Fantasy Supplement and Man-to-Man rules added to the second edition of Gygaxs previ-ously published medieval wargame Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures (co-authored with Jeff Perren, Guidon Games, 1972), Gy-gax and Arneson created the first tabletop role-playing gameone that focused less on winning and losing than on the playing itself; the grad-ual development of an imaginary character was now understood to be its own reward.23 Drawing up a list of possible names for the new game, Gygax read them aloud to his daughter, Elise, who chose Dun-geons and Dragons for its alliterative, evocative qualities.24 The new game was heavily derivative of the heroic fantasy fiction so popular at the time, borrowing liberally not only from Tolkien but also from the P. P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapolis, MD 1990); and Fine, Shared Fantasy (n. 20 above) 910. 22Gygax acknowledged that the excellent quality of the tabletop miniatures he had re-cently acquired also served as some inspiration for this shift in focus: ... many of them were so heroic looking that it seemed a good idea to play some games which would re-flect the action of the great swords and sorcery yarns. See G. Gygax, Gary Gygax on Dungeons and Dragons: Origins of the Game, The Dragon 7 (June 1977) 7. Apart from such miniatures, the only other visual components of the game were the maps that players would draw of their imaginary environments, such as dungeons or castles. 23For the history of these developments, see King and Borland, Dungeons and Dreams (n. 2 above) 16; Fine, Shared Fantasy (n. 20 above) 1315; G. Gygax, D&D, AD&D and Gaming, The Dragon 26 (June 1979) 2830; idem, Gary Gygax on Dun-geons and Dragons (n. 22 above) 7; and L. Schick, Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games (Buffalo 1991) 1720. Gygax and Arneson would later become embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over credit for the games origin and design. 24G. Gygax, The Wink of an Eye in TSR Silver Anniversary: The Story of TSR, 19751999 (Renton, WA 1999) 23. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 154works of Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, and Michael Moorcock, among others.25 Yet Tolkiens fiction was clearly the major influence;26 the game included specific, copyrighted creatures from Middle-earth, such as hobbits, ents, balrogs, and orcs, whose names continued to be used until the games sixth editon (1976), when the Tolkien estate finally threatened legal action and had them removed.27 Gygax may have claimed to have taken inspiration for his game from a broad spectrum of writers, but the fact remains that he acted on it in the early 1970s, at the height of Tolkiens popularity.28 Eventually taking the invention out of his basement, Gygax formed the company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) and published the game in January 1974 with the deceptively matter-of-fact title Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Play-able with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Although he had packaged only 1000 copies, expecting general indifference or a luke-warm reception at best, the game set quickly sold out. Through word of mouth alone, demand had rapidly outstripped supply. Consequently those who wished to play the game first had to find someone who owned it and make a photocopy of it for themselves, which they in turn would then circulate to other friends throughout the war-gaming com-munity. An underground phenomenon had been born.29 25In the preface (p. 3) to Men and Magic, the first of the games three rule booklets, Gygax makes reference to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and Fritz Leiber. He provides a more comprehen-sive list of sources in a later article, Fantasy/Swords & Sorcery, Recommended Read-ing, The Dragon 4 (December 1976) 29. 26J. E. Holmes, Fantasy Role Playing Games (New York 1981) 7071, 212213. But see the vehement objections to this view by R. Kuntz, Tolkien in Dungeons & Drag-ons, The Dragon 13 (April 1978) 8. Kuntzs article itself serves as testimony to the fact that the prevailing view among gamers at the time was that Dungeons and Dragons was largely inspired by and derivative of Tolkiens fantasy fictiona view Kuntz was trying to correct for the record. Both Holmes and Kuntz worked for Gygaxs company, TSR. 27Cf. Tolkiens own early comments about protecting his creations from unauthorized usage: Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 349 [Letter to Rayner Unwin, 2 August 1964]; 355 [Letter to W. H. Auden, 12 May 1965]. The illegal use of Tolkiens fiction by Gygax is ironic, given Gygaxs concurrent complaints about the unauthorized use of his own fantasy creation. On this, see below. 28Cf. N. Walmsley, Tolkien and the 60s in R. Giddings, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land (London 1983) 85, who argues unconvincingly that the sudden ideological, philosophical and political shift which took place in 1968 ended Tolkiens period of influence on Western youth culture. 29Gygax estimates that counting all of the illicit photocopies that were floating around, and the players who didnt own their own set, it is a safe bet that no fewer than 10,000 persons then knew of and were enthralled by the D&D game. Gygax, The Wink BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 155Gygax soon realized that there was something special about his new game and attempted to capitalize on it, releasing several more editions of Dungeons and Dragons over the next few years.30 Initially he be-lieved the role-playing element of the game to be the reason for its popularity, and consequently released three other games with the same role-playing foundation, but based in different erasone set in the Wild West (Boot Hill [1975]) and two others in the far future (Empire of the Petal Throne [1975], Metamorphosis: Alpha [1976]). All were failures.31 In hindsight, Gygax would grudgingly attribute the particular popularity of Dungeons and Dragons to its open-ended nature. Be-cause the game was rushed to print in 1974 without sufficient play-testing, and was not thoroughly revised for still another four years, there were many places in its rules that allowed much room for inter-pretation. As a result, each community of players developed their own version of the game, which they would tailor to suit their specific needs and interests.32 Some players would even go so far as to publish their own emendations and additions to the rules, an unauthorized practice about which Gygax complained bitterly and tried ruthlessly to sup-press.33 Other, less enterprising players took the other logical step in of an Eye (n. 24 above) 4. Cf. the figures given in G. Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons: What It Is and Where Its Going, The Dragon 22 (February 1979) 29. 30For a detailed description of these editions, see . 31Schick, Heroic Worlds (n. 23 above) 2122. Empire of the Petal Throne was a game based on the extremely complex fantasy world of Tkumel invented by M. A. R. Barker, former professor of linguistics and South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. See Fine, Shared Fantasy (n. 20 above) 2122, 123152. 32Schick, Heroic Worlds (n. 23 above) 21, also makes the important observation that the homespun graphic design and overall look of the game contributed to its modification by players: Paradoxically, one of the best things about the set was that so many players found it confusing or seemingly unfinished. To those unfamiliar with miniatures games, the Chainmail conventions seemed arbitrary and inexplicable. Furthermore, the rulebooks were amateurishly produced and poorly edited and illustrated, apparently the work of game fans rather than professionals. Players were excited by the revolutionary concepts of the game, but once those were grasped, many looked at the rules and rulebooks and said, You know, even I could do better than that! So, many D&D game masters, per-haps even a majority, started tinkering with the rules, and this unleashed a flood of crea-tivity that might never have come about if the first role-playing game had been complete, self-contained, and slickly professional. 33See the letter from Scott Rosenberg and the editors response in The Dragon 3 (October 1976) 20; G. Gygax, View from the Telescope Wondering Which End Is Which? The Dragon 11 (December 1977) 56, 30; idem, Role-Playing: Realism vs. Game Logic; Spell Points, Vanity Press and Rip-offs, The Dragon 16 (July 1978) 1516, 21; and Schick, Heroic Worlds (n. 23 above) 2021. In an interview conducted at the Salon de Jeux in Paris, 17 April 1993, Gygax even claimed to have utilized thugs to COURTNEY M. BOOKER 156order to clarify the many ambiguities in the rules; Gygax, like Tolkien, soon began to receive phone calls in the middle of the night from eager fans asking him to answer various questions about his creation.34 Be-fore long, Gygax would alter his opinion about the games mounting success yet again and ascribe it neither to the games role-playing com-ponent nor its desultory rules, but now to its resonance with the mythic. As he wrote in 1979, We somehow relate to stories of young princes going out into the world to seek their fortune, of knights rescuing maidens in distress and slaying drag-ons, of dealings with wicked magicians and evil witches. The myth of all peoples contain [sic] great stocks of such fantasy lore. If nothing else, the desire to believe in such seems to be innate in humanity. Whether or not there are parallel worlds or places where fantastic creatures actually live and magic works is not germane, for most of us are familiar with the concepts as if they were actual, and we have a desire to become involved, if only vicari-ously, amongst such heroic epics of magic and monsters.35 It is difficult not to see the pervasive influence of Joseph Campbell and his study of myth behind these words.36 In fact, what Gygax acknowl-edges and glosses here in Campbell-speak is something that the commercial failure of his science fiction and Wild West role-playing games had already demonstratedpeople prefer to escape into a world of heroic fantasy set specifically in a medieval key.37 Indeed, even the modern computerized recommendation generator on the Amazon.com website assumes as much: a search for a scholarly work of non-fiction search out and destroy mere photocopies of his game that were in circulation: We had rude boys going through conventions, and if they caught someone with photocopies chrchr [he makes some tearing gestures] ... They were big guys. Oh, we did it! See M. Kliehm, Gary Gygax: Interview with a Legend ... . 34Kliehm, Gary Gygax: Interview with a Legend ... (n. 33 above); and Schick, He-roic Worlds (n. 23 above) 132. 35Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons: What It Is and Where Its Going (n. 29 above) 29. See also Gygax, The Wink of an Eye (n. 24 above) 4. 36Cf. the later, explicit discussion of Campbell and myth in G. Gygax, Master of the Game: Principles and Techniques for Becoming an Expert Role-Playing Game Master (New York 1989) 165170. 37Schick, Heroic Worlds (n. 23 above) 25, however, suggests that this initial failure was due more to the misunderstanding of how to constitute a modern persona in a role-playing game: the basis for all R[ole]P[laying]G[ame] design in the midseventies was Dungeons and Dragons, and D&Ds class-and-level structure isnt well suited to situa-tions where characters cant be defined as simplistic archetypes. In science-fiction (or modern) cultures, characters are better described as collections of skills than as character types, but in 1976 everyone was still stuck on the idea of character class. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 157on medieval history currently calls up not only the book title but also the option to purchase the Lord of the Rings films on DVD, and pro-vides the following hyperlink as well: So Youd Like To ... Run a Historically-Based R[ole]P[laying]G[ame].38 So we return to the question with which Gygax was grappling: why are the Middle Ages the realm of choice for escape? Broadly construed, this is a question that takes one all the way back to Cervantes and Don Quixote, if not earlier, for, as Umberto Eco has famously argued, this privileging of the Middle Ages has been a continuous return of dreamers for centuries.39 It is not a question I shall attempt to address here. However, if one narrows the focus to the circumscribed context of gamers in the 1970s, I would agree with sociologist Daniel Dayans claims that the Middle Ages were appealing to players for their par-enthetical aspect, situated as a dark interval between two periods of Enlightenment, being largely free of restraints and seemingly open to the rule of violence. Dayan takes his argument even further and sug-gests that medieval settings offer an alluring metaphor due to a combi-nation of particular semantic features: that they appear as a catastrophic time, filled with the chaos of a civilizations collapse; that they there-fore allow, and even seem to call for, a ruthless ethic; and that they permit a playful paganism, being rife with superstition and the presence of the supernatural.40 Here I would simply note that this conception of a brutal, chaotic Middle Ages is not all that different from the image that historians themselves until quite recently held of the tenth century, that period of feudal anarchy ushered in by the collapse of the Carolin-gian empire. Yet, as many gamers of the 1970s knew from their famili-arity with Tolkiens Middle-earth, and as most historians from their reinterpretation of the primary sources know now, a stateless medie-val world was not entirely ruthless and brutal, for it was governed less by tangible external constraints than by potent internal forces such as 38On the logic and criteria that govern Amazon.coms assumptions about its custom-ers interests, see G. Linden and B. Smith, J. York, Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering, IEEE Internet Computing vol. 7, no. 1 (Janu-ary/February 2003) 7680 . 39Eco, Dreaming of the Middle Ages (n. 7 above) 6172. 40D. Dayan, Copyrighted Subcultures, American Journal of Sociology 91 (1986) 1226. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 158honor, shame, peer pressure, and a sense of moral and spiritual obliga-tions.41 By the end of 1974, play of Dungeons and Dragons had spread from the Midwest to the countrys coasts, taking hold particularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston.42 But it was in the last of these cities that the gamedespite the great notoriety it would gain in the 1980swould make its most enduring impact. One night in 1975, Dave Walden, a young computer programmer at the small Cam-bridge, Massachusetts-based engineering and consulting firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), was introduced to Dungeons and Drag-ons by a student in a class he was teaching at Harvard. The student, Eric Roberts, had created The Mirkwood Tales, a customized version of Dungeons and Dragons based explicitly on Tolkiens realm of Mid-dle-earth. Fascinated by the game, Walden soon gathered a number of his colleagues from BBN for frequent Mirkwood sessions at his house. Among the regulars was Waldens old friend and new partner at BBN, Will Crowther.43 41Cf. the remarks of Fine, Shared Fantasy (n. 20 above) 165180, regarding the self-imposed constraints on rivalry and selfishness among fantasy role-playing gamers, with the recent work on the feudal revolution by P. J. Geary, Moral Obligations and Peer Pressure: Conflict Resolution in the Medieval Aristocracy in C. Duhamel-Amado and G. Lobrichon, eds., Georges Duby: Lcriture de lHistoire (Brussels 1996) 217222; P. J. Geary, Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management Mechanisms, 10501200, in idem, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY 1994) 125160; G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY 1992); T. Head and R. Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY 1992); M. Frassetto, ed., The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium (New York 2002); and W. C. Brown and P. Grecki, eds., Conflict in Medieval Europe (Aldershot 2003). 42See the cumulative listings of players names and addresses, published in TSRs industry magazines, The Strategic Review 6 (February 1976) 10; 7 (April 1976) 7; and The Dragon 1 (June 1976) 20; 2 (August 1976) 10; 3 (October 1976) 19; 4 (December 1976) 26; 7 (June 1977) 7; 22 (February 1979) 1820, 2224, 2628; 33 (January 1980) 2336; 37 (May 1980) 4043. This feature ends in May 1980, likely due to the fact that the game by that time had simply become too widespread to continue to list individual players. 43For these details and much of what follows I rely heavily upon N. Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA 2003); and the excellent documentary account of K. Hafner and M. Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York 1996). On Roberts, Walden, Crowther, and the Mirkwood Tales sessions, see Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late 205208; and Montfort, Twisty Little Passages 86. A transcript of an interview with Crowther conducted by Hafner is available online at . BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 159Within the nascent field of computer science and engineering, Crowther was known as an eccentric, but exceptionally brilliant, pro-grammer. Inspiring, operating on a higher plane, and having an un-canny, intuitive talent, he was regarded among his colleagues as being within the top fraction of 1 percent of programmers in the world.44 At the end of 1968 BBN had been awarded a million-dollar contract from the Defense Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to develop and build the first Interface Message Processor (IMP), a device that would allow disparate computers to communicate with one another and share information. The thirty-two-year-old Crowther, who had already made significant contributions to BBNs initial bid proposal to ARPA, was a vital member of the team that was assembled to realize the project. As one of the dozen IMP Guys, he was admired for his ability to improvise one ingenious solution after another during the headlong invention and construction of what would become the Internets progenitor, the ARPAnet.45 In addition to his knack for writing wire-tight, ultra-efficient computer codean espe-cially valuable skill in the days of highly limited computer processing and storage capacitiesCrowther was renowned for his exploits as an avid spelunker, or caver. His wife Pat was even relatively famous for her caving; together with a small group of explorers, she discovered the existence of a long-sought link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves in Kentucky, a complex of tunnels, caverns, chutes, and crawl-spaces that make up the longest known cave system in the world at 144 miles.46 During his off-hours at BBN, Crowther would make use of the com-panys equipment to combine his interests in programming and caving. Gathering the detailed surveys of numerous subterranean expeditions 44Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 98, 111, 128, and for the quotation, 129. 45For example, Crowther invented a crucial dynamic-routing algorithm that heuristi-cally told the IMP both where to forward data and, given current network conditions, which path was the most efficient to send it along; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 128129. Interestingly, when describing his teams work on the IMP, Crowther uses language suggestive of his involvement with role-playing games. When he states that wed steal ideas from anywhere, but most of the time we had to roll our own (Hafner and Lyon 120), his expression of rolling an idea sounds strange at first, until one learns that in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons ones personal attributes and success within scenarios are dictated by the rolling of dice. 46See R. W. Brucker and R. A. Watson, The Longest Cave (New York 1976) 170177, 233253; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 206; and Mont-fort, Twisty Little Passages (n. 43 above) 8788. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 160he had charted as cartographer for the Cave Research Foundation, he and Pat input the topographical data into BBNs computers to map and plot the progress of their adventures.47 When Crowther and his wife divorced in 1976, the maps from these sessions provided the material, and Dungeons and Dragons the inspiration, for a remarkable game that Crowther devised for his children, one that fused his love of computers, caving, and role-playing games (Crowthers game persona, or player character was called Willie the Thief). I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, he explains, and also I had been actively exploring in cavesMammoth Cave in Ken-tucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps had some as-pects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more stan-dardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.48 Given his passion for caving, it is little wonder that Crowther held such an affinity for Dungeons and Dragons, for as Gary Gygax has recalled, at first the game [of D&D] went a long way into exploring the subter-ranean world. Then it started to become a matter of whether you had a sword or an axe, and a backpack, and rope and spikes and all these spelunking tools.49 Taking only three or four weekends to write (in FORTRAN language), Crowthers revolutionary game, called Ad-venture, was an immediate hit with his children. It was a text-only adventure, the first of what would later be dubbed interactive fiction games. Players are given terse descriptions of rooms, chambers, and 47Some of which are chronicled in Brucker and Watson, The Longest Cave. For the computer map, see Brucker and Watson (n. 46 above) 171172, 253; and V. Burnham, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 19711984 (Cambridge, MA 2001) 134. 48R. Adams, The Origins of Adventure, (2002) ; D. Peterson, Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Com-puters (Reston, VA 1983) 187188; and Montfort, Twisty Little Passages (n. 43 above) 87. 49B. E. Sones, Here There Be Dragons, Computer Games Magazine, 18 December 2001 . BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 161other environments by the computer, with which they interact by typing brief instructions indicating what they want to do and where they want to go.50 Many of the virtual places that players explore in the game were explicitly named and modeled after Crowthers favorite caves in reality, such as the Mammoth Bedquilt segment. Proceeding from room to room (caver parlance for specific caverns) through a laby-rinthine system of underground passageways, the player must system-atically solve puzzles, kill numerous, knife-throwing dwarves, collect curious objects and magic treasures, and return to the games starting point, all before ones lamp goes dark.51 Not long after writing Adventure, Crowther left BBN in 1976 to join the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Corporations Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. But before taking his leave, he showed his game to a few friends. Crude though it was, Adventure quickly be-came an underground sensation, being circulated and shared among programmers on the fledgling ARPAnet (Crowther had left the game behind on a BBN computer).52 Early that same year, Don Woods, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in the Computer Science depart-ment at Stanford University, learned about Adventure from a friend (the game had already somehow migrated to the Stanford Medical Centers 50For the important distinction that Adventure allowed one to play with a computer, rather than against it, see Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 207. Cf. Holmes, Fantasy Role Playing Games (n. 26 above) 157. As I. Livingstone, Dicing with Dragons: An Introduction to Role-Playing Games (New York 1983) 186, notes, like in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, visual elements were entirely lacking in Adventure: Visual Display Units were not in common use and the player, after typing in his command, was expected to read the output from the program as hardcopy on a teletype. For an image of a computer session using a teletype, see C. Wurster, Computers: An Illustrated History (Cologne 2002) 110111. 51An excellent simulation of the game is given by T. Kidder, The Soul of a New Ma-chine (Boston 1981) 8690. On the game in general, see M. A. Buckles, Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego 1985); J. Dibbell, Adventure, in V. Burnham, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 19711984 (Cambridge, MA 2001) 135; Montfort, Twisty Little Pas-sages (n. 43 above) 88; and for links to downloadable versions of it and a good deal more, R. Adams, The Colossal Cave Adventure Page, (2002) . Cf. the cryptic report in an early issue of TSRs role-playing game magazine The Strategic Review 1, no. 3 (Autumn, 1975) 6, that in the Cincinnati area there were several computorized [sic] games going on thereD&D and a scifi one among them. 52See R. Adams, A History of Adventure, (2002) , Often someone would install Adventure in the wee hours of the nightwithout mentioning it to the computer staffand move on, resulting in a mysterious yet impressive game program seeming to appear as if by magic; and Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (n. 51 above) 8690. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 162computer) and managed to obtain a copy.53 At the time, the Stanford computer labs were deeply immersed in a flood of Tolkien references: the roomsand even vending machineswere named after various places in Middle-earth, while the printer was loaded with elvish fonts, such as Tengwar.54 Excited by the blend of caver realism and Tolkie-nesque fantasy of the new game, Woods thoroughly play-tested it and noted several bugs in the program. He determined to contact Crow-ther (whose name was mentioned in the game) in order to obtain per-mission to tinker with his creation. Woods sent out a mass e-mailthe ARPAnet was still small enough that one could send a message to Crowther@xxx for all hosts xxx on the net and expect it to reach the correct personwhich Crowther received (being just down the road at Xerox). He replied that he was only too happy to oblige, sending Woods the source code for the program. Woods soon expanded the game significantly in size and scope, and made his revised version available to others on the network. Indeed, he encouraged people to pirate the game, installing his and Crowthers e-mail addresses in the program to allow people to contact them should they require help or have any questions about it.55 In their documentary account of these events, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon here stress the point that Crowthers and Woodss atti-tude about sharing their creation demonstrates the free spirit and em-phasis on openness that characterized the mind-set of the computer science community in its early days.56 What they neglect to mention, however, is the utterly Dungeons and DragonsTolkienesque sensibil- 53On the development and afterlife of Adventure, see the interview with Woods, Interactive Fiction? I Prefer Adventure, (June 2001), ; Dibbell, Adventure (n. 51 above) 135; and Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 207208. 54Dibbell, Adventure (n. 51 above) 135; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 208; Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (n. 51 above) 136137; and S. Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Garden City 1984) 132134. 55Dibbell, Adventure (n. 51 above) 135; Montfort, Twisty Little Passages (n. 43 above) 8990; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 208; and Levy, Hackers (n. 54 above) 132. 56Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 208. Cf. the practice developed a short time later by Warren Robinett, a disgruntled programmer, who gave himself unauthorized credit on the Atari 2600 game system version of Adventure by causing his name to appear on the screen when the player entered a secret room, like some mad monk signing his name to an illuminated manuscript to set himself apart from his anonymous fellow toilers; see D. B. weiss, Lucky Wander Boy (New York 2003) 5758. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 163ity of this same (young) mind-set, evident not only in the Adventure program itself but also in its massive, lightning-quick reception by the computer science community. As this program, referred to by com-puter users as Advent., became available to computer facilities over the country, explained John Eric Holmes in 1981, one programmer assures me that as the personnel of each center discovered it, all other work would come to a virtual halt until all the programmers had played their way through the dungeon!57 Hafner and Lyon concur, People grew bleary-eyed searching for treasure into the small hours of the morning. Ive long ago lost count of the programmers whove told me that the experience that got them started using computers was playing Adventure, [Don] Woods said.58 The obsession with Adventure quickly spawned an entire industry of computer games, such as the popular Dungeons and Dragons-based Zork (created by MIT students and, like Adventure, disseminated across the ARPAnet), and inspired work on the first MUD or multi-user dungeon, a text-based multi-user virtual game environment (again ex-plicitly based on Tolkiens Middle-earth) which players logged into, explored, and interacted with one another in a limited fashion.59 The boom in computer gaming really occurred, however, only after 1981 with the development and proliferation of the personal computer, which expanded the player pool beyond those elect few who had access to large mainframe systems at institutions.60 At the same time, interest in Dungeons and Dragons was also skyrocketing; by 1982 sales of the 57Holmes, Fantasy Role Playing Games (n. 26 above) 155. 58Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (n. 43 above) 207208. See also Levy, Hackers (n. 54 above) 294295. 59C. J. P. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Pre-sent (Santa Barbara, CA 1999) 98102; King and Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers (n. 2 above) 5157; and Montfort, Twisty Little Passages (n. 43 above) 95117, 223228. 60For an excellent, early account of the rise and influence of the personal computer, see Levy, Hackers (n. 54 above); and for images of the computers, Wurster, Computers (n. 50 above) 130297. Between 19791981 a fascinating column entitled The Electric Eye appeared in TSRs role-playing game magazine The Dragon. It documents the history, software, hardware, and vocabulary of computer adventure gaming, and profiles the players themselves. See The Dragon 26 (June 1979) 26; 33 (January 1980) 5051; 36 (April 1980) 62; 38 (June 1980) 5254; 39 (July 1980) 40; 40 (August 1980) 46, 49; 42 (October 1980) 4243; 46 (February 1981) 7071; and 57 (January 1982) 72. The results of the player profile in the last installment of the column are particularly interesting: the typical player was a 17-year-old male high school student. He has owned a 48K Apple-II+ with a disk drive, a printer, and a joystick or a paddle set for about a year. He has spent a little over $100 on software, but he mainly either copies [it] out of magazines or does it himself. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 164game and its many supplements had exceeded twenty million dollars. The game was eventually translated into more than a dozen languages and sold in thirty countries, and even had its own cartoon in 198384 that was the leader in its time slot.61 While it may not be true that most computer devotees in the 1970s were also players of Dungeons and Dragons, the reverse was very often the case, a combination that be-came an instant national stereotype after a notorious event in August of 1979.62 The disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a gifted sixteen-year-old student attending Michigan State University for computer science and math courses, caused a sensation when it was speculatederrone-ouslythat his involvement in playing Dungeons and Dragons had led him to vanish within the schools subterranean maze of steam tunnels.63 A year after being found, Egbert committed suicide, which only fueled the publics interest in the strange game, its alleged reality-warping, addictive qualities, and its relationship with computer geniuses. In 1982 the made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters (based on the sensation-alist book of the same title inspired by the Egbert disappearance), to-gether with a potboiler memoir in 1984 by the private detective in-volved in the Egbert case (a man far more detached from reality than Egbert ever was) added even more fuel to the fire.64 The comments 61Twenty-Five Years of TSR, in TSR Silver Anniversary: The Story of TSR, 19751999 (Renton, WA 1999) 719; Dungeons and Dollars, New York Times, 2 November 1980, sec. 3, p. 19. 62On the aesthetics and architectonics of rule-governed worlds common to both com-puter programming and Dungeons and Dragons, see S. Turkle, The Second Self: Com-puters and the Human Spirit (New York 1984) 7981, 285286; King and Borland, Dun-geons and Dreamers (n. 2 above) 2740; and D. S. Bennahum, Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace (New York 1998) 3337, 90115. 63See D. Weathers and D. M. Foote, Beware the Harpies! Newsweek, 24 September 1979, p. 109. A similar leap from imaginary to live gaming has now occurred with the recent nostalgia for classic video games: S. Totilo, Revenge of Pac-Man: Vintage Games Are Back, New York Times, 3 June 2004, sec. G, p. 5; W. St. John, Quick, After Him: Pac-Man Went Thataway, New York Times, 9 May 2004, sec. 9, p. 1. 64See R. Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters (New York 1981); and the movie Mazes and Monsters (1982), directed by S. H. Stern, written by R. Jaffe, T. Lazarus, and starring Tom Hanks. For the memoir by the detective, see W. Dear, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III (Boston 1984), which is remarkable for its misunderstanding of computers, Dungeons and Dragons, and Tolkiens fiction. Cf. C. Hall, Into the Dragons Lair: Detective William Dears Story of a Student Suicide, Washington Post, 28 November 1984, sec. F, p. 1. For a scathing critique of the detec-tives latest exploits, see T. Ortega, O. J. Confidential, Los Angeles New Times 6, no. 21 (2430 May 2001) 1723. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 165from a contemporary feature in Life magazine profiling one player are emblematic of the rigid stereotyping that had already taken hold: The antithesis of such prepackaged entertainments as TV and video games, Dungeons and DragonsD&D to the cognoscentiis so demanding, so cerebral, so unbelievably complicated, that it takes a whopping intelligence just to penetrate its rule books. Dungeon Mastersthe designers of each fantasy scenario, generally the most experienced and charismatic players in a groupare an elite within an elite, and of these, Gary Huckaby, whose skill and imagination have become legendary, is the crme de la crme. Gary is a scholar of fantasy. Leading figures of Greek mythology and me-dieval history, two of D&Ds chief sources, are as familiar to him as the characters in TV serials are to most boys his age. He knows the difference between a broadsword and a glaiveguisarme, and he can discourse knowl-edgeably on the fall of the Titans. His devotion is of heroic proportions. He has, he estimates, spent over $2,000 on D&D, mostly for transportation to conventions, and over 6,000 hours developing a private D&D computer simulation on his Apple II home computer.... he has a full scholarship at Menlo, where he helps run the schools computer ... his history teacher, Dwight Perkins, says Gary is among the most brilliant students he has ever had.65 By 1985 the idea of fantasy role-playing gamers as poorly socialized computer whiz kids (or wizards) often at risk of losing touch with reality had become connected in the minds of many with an apparent rise in teenage suicide and criminal behavior. Indeed, the Egbert case and still more television melodramas, together with shoddy reporting, such as an episode of CBSs television show 60 Minutes on the prob-lems caused by the game, as well as a host of Satanic panic books by religious zealots demonizing Dungeons and Dragons as a gateway activity leading youth into the occult, suggested to a credulous public that there was an actual cause-and-effect relationship between the game and crime, satanism, and suicide.66 Patricia Pulling, the mother of one 65A. Fadiman, A Teenage Master of Wizardry and Enchantment, Life, March 1982, p. 20. However, as Fine, Shared Fantasy (n. 20 above) 4147; and J. F. Denman, Misfit Dragons: The Psycho-social Implications of Fantasy Role-Playing Games (M. A. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles 1988) 4752, have shown, gamers largely inter-nalized, and flattered themselves with, this same stereotype of high intelligence and ec-centricity-understood-as-creativity. 66For the television melodramas, see Honor Thy Mother (1992), directed by D. Greene, written by R. D. Adams, based on the book by J. Bledsoe, Blood Games (New York 1992); Cruel Doubt (1992), directed by Y. Simoneau, written by J. Gay, starring Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow, based on the book by J. McGinnis, Cruel Doubt (New York 1992). See also the episode of 60 Minutes, CBS television series, 15 Septem-COURTNEY M. BOOKER 166teen who committed suicide, was so certain that her sons death had been the result of his involvement with the game (which she learned about only after his death) that she formed Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), an interest group that supplied expert wit-nesses to trials and educated police departments about the dangers of the game.67 As my colleague John Eldevik has noted, the paranoia over the neo-pagan, cultic elements of Dungeons and Dragons arose at a time when evangelical Christianity in America was first emerging as a self-con-scious social-political movement.68 The presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was supported by religious conservatives, who with Reagans victory assumed a new collective identity and sense of empowerment and purpose. Hal Lindseys books on the Apocalypse were just topping the best-seller charts, while a concern was growing within the far Right that a very evil, but unseen other was working in the shadows to usher in the age of the Antichrist.69 Within this context, ber 1985. For the religious attacks, see B. Larson, Satanism: The Seduction of Americas Youth (Nashville,1989) 4861; P. Pulling, The Devils Web: Who Is Stalking Your Chil-dren for Satan? (Lafayette, LA 1989) 77102; C. A. Raschke, Painted Black (New York 1990) 178194; J. H. Robie, The Truth about Dungeons and Dragons (Lancaster, PA 1991); and the response by G. Gygax, Blue Demons, Red Devils and RPGs, or Whats in a Name? in idem, Master of the Game (New York 1989) 157164; and M. Stackpole, The Truth about Role-Playing Games in S. Carlson and G. Larue, Satanism in America (El Cerrito, CA 1989) 231283. 67Pulling, The Devils Web (n. 66 above); J. Adler and S. Doherty, Kids: The Deadli-est Game? Newsweek, 9 September 1985, p. 93; M. Stackpole, The Pulling Report (1990) ; K. Lancaster, Do Role-Playing Games Promote Crime, Satanism and Suicide among Players as Critics Claim? Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 2 (1994) 72. Pulling filed suit against her sons high school for introducing Dungeons and Dragons to students, but had her case thrown out of court; see M. Isikoff, Parents Sue School Principal: Game Cited in Youths Suicide, Washington Post, 13 August 1983, sec. A, p. 1; E. Zibart, Judge Re-jects Suit Tying Suicide to Fantasy Game, Washington Post, 27 October 1983, sec. B, p. 7. The school district banned the game shortly after the filing of the lawsuit. Pulling then went on to sue TSR, the games manufacturer: Parents Sue Games Maker, Washington Post, 16 June 1984, sec. B, p. 2. 68For much of what follows in this paragraph, I would like to thank John Eldevik for his keen observations and suggestions following the presentation of an early version of this article on 6 June 2002 at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 69See D. DSouza, Is This the Year the World Ends? Even for Evangelicals, Betting on Armageddon Can Be Dangerous, Washington Post, 4 January 1987, sec. C, p. 1; E. Duffy, Faith and Reason: Rapture at the Time of Armageddon, The Independent (Lon-don), 5 May 1990, gazette, p. 17; G. Johnson, Portrait of the 1980s: Back in 1979, the Word Was Malaise, New York Times, 24 December 1989, sec. 4, p. 6. Lindseys most famous book, The Late Great Planet Earth (New York 1973), was described by the New York Times as the number one non-fiction best seller of its decade. It has gone through BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 167fantasy role-playing games were viewed as just a ripple on the surface of a vast and deep satanic conspiracy to subvert and conquer first America, and then the world.70 Central among the many urban myths that perpetuated this hysteria was the widespread belief in satanic ritual child molestation. The McMartin preschool case in California was un-doubtedly the most infamous example of this phenomenon. Several very young children claimed, in their answers to leading questions, that in addition to being molested by their teachers they were regularly taken down to dungeon-like secret tunnels and shown ritual sacrifices of animals.71 When the case finally ended in 1990 in a hung jury after seven years in two trials, the crowd who had been so outspoken about the reality of this underground network of child-molesting, dungeon-keeping satanists was thoroughly discredited. The manipulation of the childrens memories was deemed so egregious that the people preach-ing of satanic conspiracies were now themselves regarded largely with suspicion and contempt, as being nothing but zealots blinded by their own feelings of sanctimony, hatred, and fear. The mass hysteria in-volving panic-stricken parents, overzealous prosecutors, irresponsible talk shows, and an out-of-control tabloid press in the end ruined several peoples lives and evoked a sense of embarrassment and soul-searching by the public. Taken together with an economic recession and the end-ing of the Cold War, the evil forces that once seemed poised to take over the world had been thwartedat least for the time being. Thus by the mid-1990s the scapegoating of role-playing games had largely subsided along with the abandonment and deprecation of the witch-hunt for Americas purported satanic underground. But there was still another reason that the scare over fantasy role-playing games dis- more than 108 printings with sales of more than 18 million copies in English, with esti-mates varying between 1820 million additional copies in 54 foreign languages. 70Larson, Satanism: The Seduction of Americas Youth (n. 66 above); Pulling, The Devils Web (n. 66 above); Raschke, Painted Black (n. 66 above). 71P. Eberle, The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial (New York, 1993); C. Gorney, The Terrible Puzzle of McMartin Preschool: In California, the Long-Running Trial of a Baffling Child Molestation Case, Washington Post, 17 May 1988, sec. B, p. 1. On the made-for-TV movie of the case, see J. J. OConnor, The Horrors Behind the McMartin Trial, New York Times, 19 May 1995, sec. D, p. 16. See also the obituary for the owner of the preschool by M. Talbot, Peggy McMartin Buckey, b. 1926: The Devil in the Nursery, New York Times Magazine, 7 January 2001, p. 51. On the existence of the tunnels, for which some parents were still searching after the trial, see Developer Will Raze McMartin Preschool, New York Times, 28 April 1990, p. 9; Par-ents Seek Tunnels at McMartin School, New York Times, 1 May 1990, sec. A, p. 20; and . COURTNEY M. BOOKER 168appeared in the late 1980searly 1990s. Thanks to advances in com-puter technology and software, an increasing number of people were playing and designing Dungeons and Dragonstype games on the per-sonal computer. Realistic computer games were apparently considered safer than groups of people meeting together to play fantasy role-play-ing games, for they seemed to define more explicitly the boundary be-tween fantasy and reality. Fantasy gaming on the computer appeared to be no different than watching television or playing a video game at the arcade, which at least were familiar forms of entertainment. Of course, as technology improved the community of gamers who once gathered in a physical space continued to meet, but now more often in a virtual, computer environment. Due to the widespread implementation and availability of the Internet, one could sit alone at a computer terminal and interact with others sitting in front of their own terminalse uni-bus pluram, as David Foster Wallace has put it.72 Such virtual communities had their origins in slow play-by-mail games of the 1970s, in which disparate players declared what they would do and where they would go through letters sent to a remote central game processor, who in turn would reply with additional descriptions and the summary outcome of the players actions and decisions. Play-by-mail games were eventually superseded by the development and popularity of computer multi-user dungeons (MUDs) in the 1980s, which with the rapid improvements in computer processing power and graphics would themselves transform into the massively multi-player online role-playing games of the late 1990s to the present. While tabletop fantasy role-playing is still very much alive, the vast majority of people who play such games today do so on the Internet, logging into virtual, real-time medieval fantasy realms like EverQuest or Ultima Onlineafter paying a monthly subscription fee, of course.73 72D. F. Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, in idem, A Suppos-edly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston 1997) 2182. 73On massively multi-player online role-playing games, see the articles by D. Kushner, Where Warriors and Ogres Lock Arms Instead of Swords, New York Times, 8 August 2002, sec. G, p. 4; S. Schiesel, Voyager to a Strange Planet, New York Times, 12 June 2003, sec. G, p. 1; and for the economicsvirtual and realof such games, C. Thompson, Game Theories, The Walrus, June 2004 . BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 169*** So we come at last to Peter Jacksons cinematic representation of Tolkiens Lord of the Rings.74 In the 17 January 2002, issue of the New York Review of Books, Louis Menand, professor of English and Ameri-can literature and language at Harvard University, made the following observations after taking his fourteen-year-old nephew to see Jacksons recent film, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.75 Menand noted with some surprise that Jacksons movie bore little resemblance to the memory he himself had of Tolkiens fictional world. Turning to his young nephew, whom Menand now realized was an indispensable aid to his understanding, he asked whether the images on the screen matched the impressions his nephew had formed when reading the book. Yeah, pretty much, the teen said. The remainder of Menands review explores the reasons for this generational difference in the visu-alization of Tolkiens world. In short, Menand concludes that the reasons for this difference be-tween his and his nephews views of Tolkiens novel are twofold. Tolkiens grand but often vague descriptions of characters and places in The Lord of the Rings allow the minds eye, so to speak, to fill in the gaps. For Menand and his nephew, these gaps were smoothed over us-ing the differing stock of stylistic referents each possessedreferents that gave a particular shape to their visual imagination. Menand had read The Lord of the Rings in 1963 when he was eleven years old. What he remembered most clearly about the experience of reading Tolkiens novel was its sense of historical depth, and the fact that the book was unillustrated, except for a red and black hand-drawn map ... which names places never explored in the booksomething that was darkly wonderful to an eleven-year-olds imagination. Due to the paucity of images, Menand reasoned that I must have pictured the characters, 74Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Directed by Peter Jackson; screen-play by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien; 2001; color; 178 minutes (special extended edition, 208 minutes); WingNut Films/New Line Cinema. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Directed by Peter Jackson; screenplay by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien; 2002; color; 179 minutes (special extended edi-tion, 223 minutes); WingNut Films/New Line Cinema. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Directed by Peter Jackson; screenplay by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien; 2003; color; 201 minutes (special extended edition, 250 minutes); WingNut Films/New Line Cinema. 75For what follows, see L. Menand, Goblin Market, The New York Review of Books 49, no. 1 (17 January 2002) 89. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 170most of which are fantastic creatures, by means of a set of already learned visual styles. These were probably 1) the heroic and rather grim realism of the N. C. Wyeth drawings for books like Kidnapped and The White Company, pictures I found a little frightening, and 2) the muddy colors and romantic attitudes of comic strips like Prince Valiant ... I imagined the landscape more or less on the model of my own back-yard. After duly praising Peter Jacksons attempts to stay faithful to the spirit of Tolkiens work, Menand accounts for his fourteen-year-old nephews understanding of the film by alluding to the youths different visual sensibilities and vocabulary. What Menand had read as a kind of historical novel, his nephew had read as a heroic fantasy adventure. His visual imagination was shaped by a stock of stylistic referents that in-clude Xena Warrior Princess, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and above all the virtual reality of computer games. To Menand there are certain telltale scenes in Jacksons moviesuch as the shots of count-less orcs swarming up huge pillars in underground caverns, enormous armies flattened by a burst of supernatural light, and people being swept up hundreds of feet into the airthat smack of imagery regularly found on Sony PlayStation, Nintendo, and computer games like Age of Empires or Diablo II. They are images, concedes Menand, that were unimaginable to a kid in 1963, for whom Rocky and Bullwinkle repre-sented the cutting edge of visual culture. As the preceding pages have documented and suggested, the process by which a fringe subculture, through its idiosyncratic reception of Tolkiens fiction, ultimately came to define the medieval imagery, pacing, and plotting of one of the most popular film series in history is a relatively recent development. What was once a conception of Tolkiens medieval fantasy realm held by an eccentric few has since become the predominant visualization of the medieval worldTolkiens and otherwiseheld by the generations, like Menands nephew, raised in a world of personal computers. Yet there is an important distinction that should be appended to this statement. If the cinematic interpretation of Tolkiens novel has been informed by computer medieval fantasy games, then it is specifically the games developed during the Satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s that have had the greatest influence. These were the games that began to place an increasing emphasis upon graphics at the expense of plot and interactivity. Stunning visuals and sound, intermixed with BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 171first-person perspective (first-person-shooter, in gamer parlance), were deemed the most effective techniques by which to provide a player with an experience of deeper and deeper immersion into the games virtual realm. This is the direction that game designers have continued to follow ever since. But as Mike Singleton, a successful programmer in the mid- to late 1980s, has observed, this direction has also created its own constraints. So often we see linear plots in these games, he explains, and often this can be ultimately traced to the sheer cost of producing additional graphics that may not be seen [in] every gameplay.76 In other words, as the graphics become more complex and consequently more expensive to produce, open-ended plotswith their requisite supply of additional visualsbecome a rarely afforded luxury. Instead, what one gets in such games is an extremely vivid and detailed image of a virtual environment, but one that allows a rather narrow set of choices, routes, and scenarios that are typically encoun-tered sequentially as stages on the path to success in the game. Gamers often refer to these as hack-and-slash adventures, in which one does little more than, as a colleague of mine has put it, wander around, kill things, collect treasure, and gain experience points to increase ones powers and abilities. In such streamlined, guided, linear games, little is left to the imagination. But they sure do look great. And so it is with Peter Jacksons Lord of the Rings films. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, can largely be reduced to a host of dramatic helicopter and swooping birds-eye-view shots of landscape, and a linear sequence of frantic hack-and-slash video-game scenarios: the Black Riders chasing the hobbits to Buckle-berry ferry; the battle at Isengard between the wizards Gandalf and Sa-ruman; the battle at Weathertop between the Black Riders and Strider and the hobbits; the Black Riders chasing Arwen and Frodo to the Bruinen ford; the battle between the Fellowship and the Watcher in the Water at the West Gate to the Mines of Moria; the battle at Balins tomb between the Fellowship and the goblins and their cave troll; the Fellowships encounters with perilous obstacles during the flight to the bridge at Khazad-dm; Gandalfs battle with the Balrog on the bridge itself; and the battle between the Fellowship and the Uruk-hai at Amon Hen. While Jackson clearly had to sacrifice many of the details and lengthy digressions of Tolkiens novel due to the constraints of his me- 76Leonard, Lord of the Geeks (n. 2 above). COURTNEY M. BOOKER 172diumbeing allowed a mere eleven hours to depict the entire story on filmnevertheless his interpretation moves through a series of scenar-ios in much the same fashion that computer games are structured. There is little time for character development or interaction; instead, stunning visuals and special effects are relied upon to breathe life into a fantasy realm encountered largely apace. Of course, all of Jacksons movies do typically move at breakneck speedone look at the opening shot of his first major motion picture, Heavenly Creatures (a true story about the blurring of medieval fantasy and modern reality leading to murder), is enough to leave one breathless and reeling.77 But the visual style and narrative presentation of his interpretation of The Lord of the Rings is also highly reminiscent of computer games. Jackson may protest that as filmmakers, as writers we had no interest whatsoever in putting our junk, our baggage into these movies, but one would do well to re-member that such junk or baggage consists not only of content but also of formand that this form has baggage of its own.78 As Brian Rosebury has noted, in Tolkiens narrative, the fighting in the Cham-ber of Mazarbul [containing Balins tomb] is over in little more than a page: its focal point is the ominous fact that the orc-chieftain has se-lected Frodo for his spear-thrust (just as the Watcher in the Water has chosen Frodo to seize at the West Gate). In the film, the scene lasts over five minutes, and its theme seems to be: how very, very difficult it is to kill a cave-troll. It comes as no surprise that The Two Towers PlayStation game features a version of just this scene, in which one is required to deplete the health of the troll, as well as a version of the warg attack at the Gap of Rohan in The Two Towers, another dramati-cally unnecessary interpolation.79 To this list one could also add, among other such scenes, the lengthy combat between the wizards with their staffs, and the Fellowships perilous leap over a stairway crum-bling beneath their feet into the abyss. Indeed, this last interpolation 77Heavenly Creatures. Directed by Peter Jackson; screenplay by Frances Walsh and Peter Jackson; 1994; color; 99 minutes; WingNut Films/Miramax International. 78J. R. R. Tolkien: Creator of Middle-earth documentary on the Special Extended Edition DVD of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Cf. H. White, The Con-tent of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore 1987). 79Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (n. 11 above) 211. For additional com-ments on the growing relationship between movies and video games, see R. Levine, A Kurosawa Epic Turned Video Game, New York Times, 14 March 2004, sec. 2, p. 13; M. Marriott, Movie or Game? The Joystick Is a Tipoff, New York Times, 25 March 2004, sec. G; p. 1; and L. M. Holson, In Land of Oscars, Rich New Category Is Best Video Game, New York Times, 10 April 2004, sec. A, p. 1. BYTE-SIZED MIDDLE AGES 173was the very first shot designed and programmed by the films com-puter pre-visualization team, a shot that, in its pre-viz animatic version, looks like it came right out of a video game from the early 1980s.80 In conclusion, the emphasis in both fantasy computer games and Jacksons Lord of the Rings films upon graphics at the expense of plot has two implications regarding the popular conception of the Middle Ages. First, the linear string of hack-and-slash and/or problem-solving scenarios in the games and films subtly leads one to believe that people in the Middle Ages, like the virtual characters in our computer-en-hanced pseudo-medieval realms, reasoned or strategized as we do. Within such scenarios, one challenge after another is overcome typi-cally by means of a combination of violence and logic, a process that is impressed into the minds of many as being ahistorical. While the possi-bilities and constraints during the Middle Ages were different, surely, it is assumed, when threatened, people reasoned then in the same way as they do today. Here the absence of religion and theology is especially evident. Second, the reliance upon graphics to achieve an immersion effect means that the increasing amount of attention devoted to illus-trating the pseudo-medieval world, down to the smallest detail, comes at the cost of a personalized Middle Ages. Fantasy role-playing gamers were already concerned about this concession in the early 1980s, when the technology of personal computers had improved enough to permit electronic gaming; the open-ended quality that had contributed to the initial success of Dungeons and Dragons was suddenly seen to be at risk.81 Indeed, this open-ended quality was often considered a vital catalyst for the creative imagination, as we have seenrecall Menands experience as a child wondering what those unexplored places named on Tolkiens map were like; or the widespread fascination with the text-only descriptions of caverns in Crowthers and Woodss Adventure 80See the Storyboards and Pre-Viz: Making Words into Images documentary on the Special Extended Edition DVD of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. On Peter Jacksons views regarding the use of computers to realize Tolkiens novel, see F. Topel, CGI That Doesnt Suck: An Interview with Peter Jackson . 81See R. Krebs, D&D Meets the Electronic Age, The Dragon 26 (June 1979) 26; and the observations Livingstone, Dicing with Dragons (n. 50 above) 190191. See also the comments of Dayan, Copyrighted Subcultures (n. 40 above) 12271228, on the consequences of Gary Gygaxs attempts to delimit, copyright, and profit from the fantasy realm he had created. COURTNEY M. BOOKER 174game; or even the chilling effect that the minions of Sauron possess in the 1978 animated movie of The Lord of the Rings thanks to their dark and blurred appearance.82 If, as I have argued, the popular conception of the Middle Ages is now largely Tolkienesque, it is a conception that will be increasingly based on Jacksons high-definition C[omputer] G[enerated]I[magery] of Tolkiens novel, with all the baggagethe history, possibilities, and constraintsthat CGI brings with it.83 Tolkien himself foresaw all this more than half a century ago. It is only fitting, therefore, to allow him to have the last word: It is a curse, he lamented in 1944, having the epic temperament in an over-crowded age, devoted to the snappy bits.84 Department of History University of British Columbia Suite 1297, 1873 East Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada 82See The Lord of the Rings; directed by Ralph Bakshi; screenplay by Peter S. Beagle and Chris Conkling, based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien; 1978; color; animated; 132 minutes. This blurring effect is enhanced by the combination of live action shots of actors overlaid with animation, a process known as rotoscoping. As Leonard, Lord of the Geeks (n. 2 above) points out, the BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings (script adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, 1981, 13 hours) similarly leaves much to the imagination. 83On representations of the Middle Ages in film, see S. Airlie, Strange Eventful Histories: The Middle Ages in the Cinema in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson, eds., The Medieval World (London 2001) 163183 (although Jacksons films of Tolkiens novel are not discussed, since they were released after the article was written). 84Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 90 [Letter to Christopher Tolkien, 1 August 1944]. See also Tolkiens comments, Carpenter, The Letters (n. 8 above) 228 [Letter to Molly Waldron, 30 November 1955]; 272276 [Letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, June 1958], where he states that The Lord of the Rings is quite unsuitable for dramatiza-tion, and that, by contracting and hurrying time in his novel, such dramatizations have the effect of reducing the importance of the Quest. Again and again, Tolkien stressed the fact that, in a dramatic representation, it would be far better to omit scenes from his book altogether than to present them in a meaningless way and thus make a farce of them and the journey as a whole. /ColorImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorImageDict > /AntiAliasGrayImages false /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict > /GrayImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayImageDict > /AntiAliasMonoImages false /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict > /AllowPSXObjects false /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName (http://www.color.org) /PDFXTrapped /Unknown /Description >>> setdistillerparams> setpagedevice